Listening

One of the hardest skills, both in our home language, as well as a second or third language we are trying to learn, is the skill of listening.
For anyone learning a foreign language this skill is particularly difficult, especially in everyday life because when we listen to native speakers, they speak quickly, use poor grammatical choices and often do not speak in full sentences. In other words, they break many of the rules you have learnt to apply in speaking the language!

One approach that you should explore from intermediate level onwards is to collect as much authentic listening material as you can find and, of course, focus on topics that you are interested in or have some knowledge of. (No listening, after all, is done in a vacuum.) Source materials might be anything from favourite films with a soundtrack in English available on video to radio or TV programmes of interest that you can make a recording of. It is important that the material should be not more than a little above your current level of understanding.
The advantage of having a recording of at least some of the material is that it offers the possibility of playing the tape a second (or even third or fourth) time and thus having another chance to process the information once more. It is important, of course, not to overdo this, otherwise the objective of the exercise - attentive listening and processing the information as efficiently as possible - will be defeated.
It is important that most of the listening material that you work with:

• 
  should be at, or only slightly above, your level of language difficulty;
  
  
  
• should be well contextualised so that it enables you to make predictions about the likely development of the topic.

If you can ensure this, listening will become so much easier. In this exercise, the contextualisation provided should help you to understand what the listening text is about.